[URBAN NOTE] On the 40th anniversary of the CN Tower

[rfmcdonald]

The above photo of the CN Tower, which I shared with you last year, is one of my favourite photos of the CN Tower. Today happens to be its 40th birthday.

On the 24th, Spacing Toronto published the Chris Bateman article "How Toronto built the CN Tower", looking at the politics and mechanics of the tower's construction.

The CN Tower is one of the most important buildings ever constructed in Canada.

Like it or loathe it, the absurd, 553-metre concrete tower, which opened to the public 40 years ago this Sunday, is the defining structure of this city.

For outsiders, it’s the building that separates the Toronto skyline from those of other world cities; for people who live close to the core, it’s a constant presence, looming large in the background like a benevolent giant.

Despite its monumentality and popularity with tourists, the CN Tower isn’t really a building the people of Toronto think about much. For that reason, not many people know that the city’s most famous building is actually a relic of a much bigger development proposal.

The origins of the CN Tower lie in the abortive Metro Centre proposal for downtown Toronto.

The Toronto Star's Shawn Micallef had a great article, "The CN Tower turns 40 and one man’s obsession is to tell its stories", looking at the story of one man devoted to collecting the stories surrounding the tower's construction.

One man has made it his life’s work to compile more of the stories of the 1,537 people who built the tower, from the bean counters to the guys pouring cement at 1,000 feet.

“The engineering history of the CN Tower has been overlooked, unlike London’s Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower or the World Trade Center,” says Robert Lansdale. “As for the people who built it, their history has been swept under the rug.”

A self-proclaimed “CN Tower kid” who was “always down there watching it go up” in the early 1970s, Lansdale says he has spent 5,000 to 6,000 hours compiling and recreating a visual history of the Tower’s design and construction “as if it’s being done today.”

By “today” he means the way so much of our world is documented from multiple angles by multiple people on various social media channels, often with high quality photographs. For Lansdale, it’s meant years of scouring both public and private archives for pictures, many of them rarely seen, behind the scenes views. Along the way, he collected many stories too for a project he calls “the impossible dream.”

“This is really about people, not the tower,” he says. “That’s just concrete.”